56 PROCTOR | November 2016
The new mobility –
opportunity and threat
A practice idea that might make a big difference
For some 20 years, delegates
in the QLS Practice Management
Course (PMC) have been asked
what is driving them to be owners
or co-owners in law firms.
And for 20 years two themes have dominated
without exception – money and control.
In large practices money typically is first,
but control (or related concept) a close
second. For sole practitioners, control
absolutely dominates – but without
underestimating the importance of money.
Until this year...
In the most recent smaller practices PMC,
18 out of a group of 38 said that their driving
reason for wanting to own a practice was
flexibility. That is, as owners, they could
unilaterally determine how, where and when
they practised – far beyond the kind of
flexibility available as employees. So in the
space of just one year, flexibility has gone
from below the radar to the dominant driver.
Internationally, Australian practices are relatively
small – that is, high numbers of firms relative to
total practitioners – which seems to be driven
by a fierce Australian drive for independence.
All of these 18 delegates were going down
the microfirm path – where their office was
substantially virtual, with no rentals, no support
staff, and the assistance of a fair amount
of desktop technology, which in the current
scheme of things is now quite normal and
unremarkable. There are really only two generic
forms of business risk – missing the boat
and sinking the boat, and microfirms have
substantially eliminated sinking the boat risk.
This is not a random observation. At QLS
Symposium in March this year, 20 people
in a group of about 90 in the practice
management session declared that they
operated on some variant of a microfirm.
And just think back – a popular discourse
in the mid-’90s was whether there was a
future for sole practices at all!
Coincidentally, where in recent years the
dominant themes in the ALPMA Practice
Innovation Awards have been around fixed
pricing and technology-enabled solutions,
this year saw a wave of entrants focused on
employee (and partner) flexibility – including
the eventual winner and another finalist.
So the scene is set. And this is just the
beginning. Firms wanting to retain their best
talent can no longer assume all employees are
the same – that is, they all want to be partners
and will wait indefinitely for the opportunity.
A growing number are wanting a workable
combination of flexibility with reasonable
money. They can achieve this in one of three
ways – get it from their current employer; get
if from an alternative employer; or simply jump
ship and be up and running in a very low-
cost, independent business in no time at all.
This scenario will only become more
pronounced. The choice for all traditional
firms is whether they want to deal with it
as an opportunity or a threat.
Dr Peter Lynch
p.lynch@dcilyncon.com.au
Keep it simple
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